Various methods and procedures are known and have been used in the past for determining the center of gravity, mass center, rotational axes, and weight distribution for balancing various work parts, both individually and in assembled combinations, both to provide for their balanced support, make corrections and changes, avoid force moments which induce vibrational tendencies, and the like.
Although close attention is given to such matters during their design and manufacture, the necessary tolerances required for reasonably large volume production, in particular, produces combinations or stacking of tolerance variations which can only be evaluated and corrected for within the completed part itself by equipment capable of use in the manufacturing plant and in the final inspection line.
As a consequence, such equipment must be reasonably rugged in construction and still have the high degree of sensitivity which is required of it. It must also be capable of both highly accurate readings and resonably fast response for full line inspection use and other than periodic spot-checks; as is most commonly done due to present limitations in time or accuracy imposed by presently known balancing devices.
Of still further importance, the work under test should have its centers located or be capable of being corrected at the inspection stations; which requires reasonably secure clamping for corrections and solid backing support for centers to be made immediately after the determination of the degree and extent of error or location of centers. And, correction means should be able to approach the work from either axial direction in locating or establishing centers for maximum adaptability for use on various parts and with various corrective devices.
For production use it is also important that the determinations be made within 3-10 seconds so that the transference of balancing data to establish centers and/or the correction itself can be accomplished, if possible, within less than one minutes time.
Balancing devices which merely pass or reject a part, to a second correction line, can also prove costly where the corrections needed in a particular run are relatively minor. Reasonably fast determinations of imbalance or mass center data should be capable of being made at the inspection station, or immediately thereafter, with only those parts that are beyond line correction diverted to a corrective line which, even then, should have the corrective data fed to it from the previously made determinations.
It is with these objects in mind that the present invention has been devised.